Is Ideology Reduction working correctly?

[Frozen Yakman]

Playing as Democratic Path of Germany, I had invited everybody into my faction that the focus tree allowed for and only Romania (already joined Commintern) and Poland (already created its own faction that I can't spell) opted out. For those that haven't gone down this rout, part of Germany creating a the faction involves giving everybody nearby a national spirit that gives a bonus to Democratic ideology growth and a negative to Communist ideology growth. Fast forward a few years into the wars against Fascist Italy and a France empowered Comintern and the Allies and USA have done absolutely nothing. USA AI still doesn't understand how to do the Pearl Harbor Gambit and the UKs war goals against the Soviets and Japan are far too easy for the UK to get blocked out of. Oddly enough, going to war against firmly Democratic countries like Denmark or the Netherlands are really easy for it to do, which is exactly what happened. See that National Spirit hadn't replaced Communist ideology with Democratic ideology, it replaced Communist ideology with Fascist ideology which put them over the tipping point for the UK's foci. This doesn't sound like things are working correctly.

 

[Wasted Shampoo]

My friend, the focus tree will never work correctly. It’s impossible for the AI to react plausibly to the interactions and events between countries, the outcome will always be without any logic. The player can make a fairly high number of possibilities but the AI can’t simply keep up.

The focus tree system is flawed since the beginning and the truth is that there will never be a patch able to fix it.

It’s just too ambitious for a game with a 2 people team dedicated to the AI.

 

[TheMeInTeam]

My friend, the focus tree will never work correctly. It’s impossible for the AI to react plausibly to the interactions and events between countries, the outcome will always be without any logic. The player can make a fairly high number of possibilities but the AI can’t simply keep up.

The focus tree system is flawed since the beginning and the truth is that there will never be a patch able to fix it.

It’s just too ambitious for a game with a 2 people team dedicated to the AI.

It's a system designed for failure in the first place. When you set up focuses this way you're basically asking that a human being foresee a huge number of possible iterations and somehow make sure they all work.

It's a big ask, unreasonable on a human being. The result is predictable and continuously predicted: weird choices that make no sense in either history or game terms because arbitrary NF chains between countries interact unexpectedly.

Worse still, some NFs straight up bypass game rules, rather than building the rules so that an event can happen given appropriate context regardless of nations in question.

 

[Wasted Shampoo]

It's a system designed for failure in the first place. When you set up focuses this way you're basically asking that a human being foresee a huge number of possible iterations and somehow make sure they all work.

It's a big ask, unreasonable on a human being. The result is predictable and continuously predicted: weird choices that make no sense in either history or game terms because arbitrary NF chains between countries interact unexpectedly.

Worse still, some NFs straight up bypass game rules, rather than building the rules so that an event can happen given appropriate context regardless of nations in question.

So, now that we agreed over the focus trees system and keeping in mind that it cannot be changed, What do we do? How can it be solved?

 

[TheMeInTeam]

If I had a good answer for that one I'd have said it. For now I just want occupations and caps to work :/.

 

[KalypsoKirin]

So, now that we agreed over the focus trees system and keeping in mind that it cannot be changed, What do we do? How can it be solved?

That's not an easy question to answer in any situation.
I think the National Focus tree, in concept, is a very good idea, I like the way it organizes information so that players can easily identify shot term goals, long term goals, and what they need to do to achieve them. Perhaps, a decent solution, would be to make it more like the new missions system in EU4. You open up the tree and see a bunch of goals you can currently do. You need to perform the task related to the goal, and then click to collect your reward for accomplishing the goal. Then again, this would have the drawback of needing to reconsider the way the AI is set up, and it might make the problems players who want the game to always play out historically already have even worse.

 

[Wasted Shampoo]

That's not an easy question to answer in any situation.
I think the National Focus tree, in concept, is a very good idea, I like the way it organizes information so that players can easily identify shot term goals, long term goals, and what they need to do to achieve them. Perhaps, a decent solution, would be to make it more like the new missions system in EU4. You open up the tree and see a bunch of goals you can currently do. You need to perform the task related to the goal, and then click to collect your reward for accomplishing the goal. Then again, this would have the drawback of needing to reconsider the way the AI is set up, and it might make the problems players who want the game to always play out historically already have even worse.

I still don’t like the focus tree idea, the only unpredictable thing is the one that will ruin your game. Also, the focus tree allows you to plan your strategy since the start, giving always the opportunity to the player to know exactly what is going to happen and when.

 

[Frozen Yakman]

This is all nice, but the topic of this thread is not whether focuses work it's whether negative modifiers to ideologies work as intended.

 

[Brucesim2003]

Paradoxically, the focus should have the minus to communist removed. Then there would just be a tiny growth toward democracy. Either that or change the focus to an anti-extremist focus that gives a minus to both communism and fascism. That would result in a faster growth of democracy. It would also make sense, given the wording of the events at the start of the German civil war, which basically calls the nazis gutter trash.